B.C. salmon: something's not fishy
By MARK HUME - Toronto Globe and Mail
Something dreadful is happening to the rivers on Vancouver Island. Pool by
pool, riffle by riffle, they are dying.
To a casual passerby, glancing down from one of the slick new bridges on the
Island Highway, nothing seems amiss. Rivers like the Cowichan, Nanaimo,
Little Qualicum, Englishman, Trent and Tsable look just as beautiful as
ever, running from under the mossy, green forests to the blue waters of
Georgia Strait.
Mike McCulloch knows better.
Mr. McCulloch, a fisheries technician with the B.C. Conservation Foundation,
helps organize small teams of swimmers that are responsible for taking an
unusual annual census. They pull on wet suits against the bone-numbing cold,
and snorkel the rivers that flow out of Vancouver Island's rugged mountains.
They are looking for an increasingly rare species of salmon known as
steelhead. They aren't finding many.
The Gold River, on Vancouver Island's West Coast, historically had runs of
as many as 5,000 steelhead.
Last year, swimmers counted 900; this year they found 35.
"The magnitude of decline is overwhelming," said Mr. McCulloch. There are
worse statistics. In the little Trent River, which should have 100
steelhead, the snorkel team found only two. Both females.
In Goldstream, a small river just outside Victoria that spills from one
dappled pool to another, there should be several hundred steelhead waiting
to spawn. The swimmers found none.
The trend is repeated in river after river. The fish population data,
compiled by swimmers who peer under banks and dive into the gloomy darkness
of deep pools, is mathematically plotting the path to extinction.
"When you get down to one or two fish in a stream we call it
quasi-extinction," Mr. McCulloch said. "At zero, it is termed extirpation,
meaning the species is extinct locally."
Steelhead rivers on Vancouver Island have been in trouble for several years,
but never have the numbers been so low. "It's a situation that's getting
quite desperate," Mr. McCulloch said. "We're only a life cycle away from a
spiral into oblivion."
Steelhead aren't like other salmon on the Pacific Coast. They are believed
to be the progenitor species, the fish that spawned all the other kinds of
salmon.
There are six species of wild Pacific salmon, each filling its own niche in
the ecosystem. Some, like pinks, are small but prolific. Others, like
chinook, are fewer in number but grow to immense sizes. But only one, the
steelhead, survives spawning. The irony is that, for reasons not fully
understood, steelhead, the survivors, are now dying out as a species.
Mr. McCulloch said habitat destruction is part of the problem. Vancouver
Island watersheds have been logged and many rivers run through heavily
urbanized areas. Some watersheds are dammed. Poor ocean survival, due to a
shift in temperatures, is a major factor affecting all salmon species.
Steelhead, which have been tracked all the way to the coast of Russia in
their Pacific migrations, have been the hardest hit. Because they live
longer in their freshwater phase, they have also suffered the most in the
rivers.
The B.C. Conservation Foundation, a non-profit group, is working jointly
with the provincial Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection to restore
Vancouver Island steelhead. One plan, not yet funded, is to fertilize 15
rivers where nutrient levels are low because of declining salmon runs.
When salmon die after spawning, their bodies decompose, enriching the
watersheds and stimulating the growth of aquatic insects, which feed young
fish. But overfishing and habitat problems have robbed many rivers of the
massive salmon runs they once had, stripping the streams of nutrients.
Steelhead usually live for two years in freshwater before heading to the
ocean. If they are underfed, they will be too small to survive when they run
to the sea. Mr. McCulloch has been scrounging dead salmon from federal
salmon hatcheries and placing them in rivers as fertilizer, hoping to
stimulate the growth of baby steelhead. From the dead bodies of one species
they hope to revive another. In one experimental program, artificial
fertilization saved the Keogh River, where steelhead runs are stable and
salmon stocks are increasing.
Mr. McCulloch calls the Keogh "a beacon" in the darkness, but the
restoration project can't be copied without more money. The foundation and
government fisheries agencies need $4-million a year in excess of their core
funding, about double what they have. BC Hydro and some forest companies are
helping with corporate donations, but the federal government, which has
$1-billion to help beef farmers, which squanders millions on sponsorship
scandals and which dithers over endangered-species legislation, seems
oblivious to the steelhead crisis.
"There are too many rivers in trouble and not enough money," Mr. McCulloch
said.
Meanwhile, in the Trent, two females wait alone -- the last hope for a
river.

Dave

is the Gold a C&R river? If so for how long? It kind of caught me off guard when you first mentioned this crisis. I always thought BC rivers were healthier than ours...sounds like that isn't the case . We must share this alarming decline. This article does mention Steelhead as a species of salmon though....They say it is the only species of salmon to survive spawning. Well trout survive spawning last time I checked. I think the forest prctices up in BC need a serious look...probably too late though. Whatever happened to that on pristine wilderness that they wanted to log? All super old growth...and one of the last pristine habitats...can't remember the name...rain forest?

Do the Alaska commercials figure into this? I know they are pissed at Canada up in Alaska and have been hammering BC river fish.

Keep us posted if you find anything new.

GP: With only a few exceptions, too minor to mention, all B.C. rivers are C&R for wild steelhead. The Gold made a remarkable rebound after implementation of C&R in the 80's. For years it was a truly awesome fishery. Nick Amato and I hooked 22 steelhead in one run about seven years ago. We considered a ten fish day to be only average. Now, for reason that I don't think any of us understand, the majority of the rivers on the island are in big trouble.

It’s easy to blame logging - no doubt it has hurt, and in the case of the Gold the big pulp mill at the mouth of the river probably didn't help. But there are so many rivers on the Island that are suffering and there does not seem to me to be a common thread. They do not have a big native gill net problem. And most commercial nets are not working when thewinter steelhead return in Nov-May, so it’s really hard to pinpoint the cause or causes. I guess we will need to wait to see what the biologists tell us.

So sad to read about this crisis situation. I have an old Fishing the West video clip on the Gold River. Always dreamed of fishing it one day. Hope it's not too late.

Are there many salmon farms in the area? I would think that some infectious disease could be wiping them out? Perhaps sea lice predation on vulnerable smolts? Sure hope they figure it out soon.

I was shocked at the extent of clear cutting on Vancouver island. If you ever fly over it, you will see what I mean. It looks more like a bald knob than a forrest. In places, it looks like the Tundra... one huge hilly clearcut

All the nets to and from the island cannot help.
Fly over during the summer and it's amazing that any fish can get to some of those rivers.

I attribute the fish declines on logging i flew over the island in '88 and it was seriously
depressing. I had read about the island for decades and when i finally had the chance it was completely anti-climatic.
A patchwork of clearcut after clearcut.
Funny thing was the fishing sucked A$$ that week off of Barkley sound. I blamed the clearcutting for the bad fishing then and still do today. You can't have clearcutting and still have succesful wild fish rearing going on. It's that simple.

I don't like the sound of that. I'm going to spend 2 weeks up there this summer and I was planning on trying to find some summer runs. I hope I'm not too late.

I thought it was funny a Fisheries Technician (Biologist?) called them a salmon species. All righty then. How are their sea lion/seal populations doing?

Technically/scientifically the Pacific salmon and trouts are in the same genus Oncorhynchus; they're all pretty closely related. The distinction that we make between 'salmon' and 'trouts' is rather artificial, and a holdover from when salmon and trouts were considered separate genera (Oncorhynchus and Salmo). That all changed back in the 80s I believe. The technician was not wrong.

The low runs on Vancouver Is streams have been going on for a number of years now, in fact for about as long as Puget Sound native steelhead runs have been in decline. A few years ago, there was a distinct difference in run sizes between island streams that flowed west, discharging onto the continental shelf and those flowing east, discharging to the Sound (Strait of Georgia). Back then the run data strongly suggested that something was going on in the Sound that was not favoring steelhead survival. I'm don't know whether this distinction is still showing in island streams or whether all of the runs are showing declines.

Although logging on the island has been extensive, has anyone looked at the degree of logging in each separate watershed and comparing this to indivudual run sizes? Seems to me such a watershed analysis could determine if logging is THE MAJOR contributor or just another contributor to the decline. I do wonder. Coho salmon also over winter in streams, most spending from 1.5 to 2 years in freshwater before outmigrating, but the coho numbers do not seem to be declining like the steelhead. In fact, coho are booming in some Puget Sound streams.

And if its the net pens, wouldn't they affect all of the species as well? Juvenile chinook spend a great deal more time in estuaries than steelhead, so could have higher exposure levels to the pens and associated diseases. Then again, steelhead smolts are larger and not as shoreline oriented so may attract the parasites. But coho are also larger and behave in much the same manner. Big mystery.

I hope Canada pours some money into this. It's not only a serious problem, but solving it could tease out some answers to some pretty important questions regarding the early survival of salmon and steelhead.